!dev

My mental health has been down the drain b'cuz of circumstances. And unfunnily, it did end up taking the better of me. yet folks around me still do not believe it's a thing that people don't want to live anymore; rather it's a "childish" thing and "are you so weak" thing.

And I'm just gonna tell you, if you ever said that to someone who feels like the world is coming to an end for them, you're an unbearable ass, and you're probably one reason that person wants to off themself.

Living around some people is just torture on its own.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

I am at the lowest point of my mental health. Lol

I hope it doesn't get any lower than this because I have reached my breaking point.

I have nobody to talk to. I don't want to be a cry baby, nagging and whining all the time.

My friends here Jason (from Zurich and not Australia) and Rutee07 were in similar position when I last spoke to them here. I wonder what happened to them!

Shall I call in for yet another superficial therapy session? Or shall I just wait for the feeling to pass and continue being busy?

I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?

Trying to buy a house in another state. First time moving out of state, first time trying to buy a house. Making first offer this weekend. Which is terrifying, and exciting. But it’s also lonely because my other half is in the other state looking at houses and I’m stuck here working and taking care of the cats.

Had a poor mental health day yesterday. Got a call today that my mama (gran on my mum’s side) took a tumble and has been in hospital and they don’t think she’ll pull through. I don’t have many memories of her, but the memories I do have are happy ones. She was always full of life and love and kindness.

💔

"Writing good code is a charity". ( - saves time, effort, mental-health, & career of next developer).

I don't wanna hear anyone dismissing college education, specially from people that can't do asymptotic analysis and have no clue what a pointer is. It's not fine. What do you think people spend 4+ years studying for? For this shit? There's a reason why a diploma has a weight, it's not just decoration.

I get it that the american educational system is fucked up and you guys have to pay a shit ton of money for it, but you can't just pretend it's worth nothing.

How diminishing it is to hear people shit on a life long struggle to get where i am today. I had to study a ton to get into college, and I'm still pouring my blood and mental health into my studies, only for some random to say that a youtube tutorial is worth the same.

I sometimes feel like some people's comments on devrant are enough for a mental health crisis diagnosis. I wonder, how can we diagnose people through text? And can, let's say, ML do any better.

I mean; let's say for example abusive behaviors. This may be an online community but that doesn't stop some from abusing others, right? But the only form of communication here is text, right? What if you could diagnose... Not even that. What if you could inform a mental health expert about a toxic behavior online? We do have a lot of "internet policing" but we have no "internet mental health help" for toxic behaviors and attempts to mitigate that. I don't mean banning people. I mean literally in simplest form tag a psychotherapist in the convo.

Just thinking. :)

Welp. My mental health is down the drain.

I don't want to talk to anyone about it, but I am well aware of the situation. I can't even bring myself to sleep on a proper time frame, and depression is crawling back like an abusive ex.

There. Complete failure. Where do I sign out for this life?

Footnote:This is not fishing for attention, more like ranting in the void. (or trying to) Apologies to the one who I should've probably talked to about this, but never did.

Not gonna lie I have toxic people in my life and I have caught myself in multiple situations where I behaved differently, did or did not do something just because they were near.

Whenever these people are gone it’s just the most beautiful thing to be able to relax (also in my mind).

It’s crazy what other people do with us and how we can exaggerate all these feelings and emotions. The best thing I can do is to get rid of this toxicity in my life and move on.

Anybody else or is it just me?

How are you guys taking care of mental health?

I feel down in dumps. Burnt out from previous job and life seems like a drag.

Any advice appreciated as I feel pretty isolated.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

Undoubtedly the most common mistake that devs do : Ignoring your personal health, be it mental or physical.

I almost went through a burnout before realising things need to change.

Changed my lifestyle upside down after that
- Switched from wfh to an office job
- I cycle 12kms a day now
- Got a standing desk for myself to be more active
- and have a journal where i literally dump everything off my brain

FML or how I made myself unhireable

TL;DR: Working as a QA.
Changed jobs.
New job sucked.
Left after three months.
Got laid off from the next one after 4 months (not my fault).
Got depressed.
Got a Dev job back in the first company.
Job sucks, cannot leave… (5 months in)

Full rant:
I was doing pretty well as a QA Enginner. Started with internship, then junior in company A, then big pay rise moving to company B, where I quickly got promoted to Senior. As I was nearing 3yrs of exp, I decided it’s time for a change, as things were getting worse project-wise and felt like I was regressing. Also I was constantly bombarded with offers of +50% of my salary I could easily land, while company offered 10%.

Moved on to company C. This is where it started getting rocky. I was told I would be working on this one project, strictly test automation, nothing exciting but an easy gig. However week in, I was told to work on this other project 50/50. This was a startup kind of thing. It was a nightmare. Only manual testing. Most tickets had only a vague title, no description, no requirements, nothing. How do one test something without any knowledge how it should work? Besides that, the project lead on the client side was aggressive sometimes.
The workload was immense - 4 devs, 2 of them doing heavy overtime, so the output was like 6 devs and half of a tester….
Despite raising the problems, nothing was going to change, nor I could switch projects. The job began to heavily affect my mental health. Decided not to prolong my contract and left after 3 month probation period.

Quickly landed a job in company D. As my burnout as a tester kept bothering me more and more I decided that this was going to be my last job as a QA and next one will be a Dev. You see, I never enjoyed the tester part, I always enjoyed the automation part more. The plan was to learn in free time and after 18-24 months start applying for a dev role to see if I can land one (switching inside D was not an option). All plans went to hell, as I was handed a one month notice by the end of my third month. A month before my wedding… I was told the company was having financial issues and was laid off with about 30% of people in the company (mostly new hires).

I got depressed. I wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days. I never thought something like this would ever happen to me. Standing by my decision I was applying for development jobs, but most recruiters seeing either only QA experience or my recent 3 and 4 month employment periods weren’t responsive. Applying for testing jobs was a bit better but still nothing like before C and D.

Since company B I stayed in touch with my former manager, and he kept telling me that a new team has taken over most of the shitty work, and they are now working on cooler stuff and have more coming. He encouraged me to come back, as he has always thought highly of me professionally.
Looking at my options, I could probably get another testing job with lower pay, maybe I could land a junior Dev with like 1/3 of my salary or I could go back. So in my dark time I have reached out to my manager and just like that he got me a Senior Dev position, same pay as in company D.

Finally what I wanted right? Yeah… As soon I as joined all the new initiatives were being dropped one by one, and backlog got flooded with bugs and sh*t again. Five months in I hate my job again. Cannot leave cause no one will hire me…

Where I made the mistake?
Shouldn’t leave B despite facing regression and being underpaid?
Shouldn’t leave C no matter what?
Shouldn’t come back to B?

!dev

There are two weeks left until the PhD application results are published. But I'm having such awful nervous breakdowns. I don't even know, if it's anxiety or if I'm literally dying inside from something else. From an almost-heart-attack today when I got a trivial and unrelated bad-news email, to keep having weird dreams about things like end of the world and post-apocalyptic life, or being jumpy all the time.

... And it's not like it's life or death, I know that. I know that I can do other things if this doesn't stick. I know things will workout the way they should; I know all of those. But there's just something destroying my physical and mental health right now, and I don't even know if it's just the anxiety for the next big step in my career, or something else, or how I should deal with it.

... Anyways, amannoyed.

How to manage when you start something good for you, start taking decisions for your good and people start spreading hate about you. It obviously will effects your mental health right?
How you guys manage it? I mean how?

Today I'm feeling of getting bullied and getting bullied again from the same person. I'm correct but can't show the correctness just because there's no proof I've in-hand.

I'm literally tired of people now!

How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.

Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.

I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.

However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.

My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.

I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.

i can see my mental health steadily declining like i got hit with DoT in real life

Currently trying to find a programming job - seriously, why is everything still operating with a lockdown mindset as if there's no COVID-19 vaccine? I'm simply looking to work in an office 9-5 and go home at the end of the day, leaving work behind until the next day when I am refreshed, and not having remote colleagues badger me when I'm out of the office. This was standard before the pandemic and now impossible to find. Hybrid is not an option, work should never intrude into my home again after it's bruising (and lasting) effects on my mental health.

Does anyone know where I might find a job like this? I tried Goldman Sachs but they don't have any offices in my city.

Taking tomorrow off. I’m just extremely angry at all of this and need to take a mental health break. The constant GitHub and Apple iCloud outages have brought productivity to a halt. I need to get work done and the systems I rely on are down. WTF Microsoft? WTF Apple?

Someone in the #us slack channel posted about how, if other Americas were dealing with roe v wade, they could come to the mental health channel.

I really want to respond about how Americans are a diverse group, and some are thankful for a judgement that preserves what some consider life, and to keep our diverse opinions in mind.

But I'm not going to. I'm not stupid. It's not worth starting a fight or potentially losing a job over. So I remain silent, like a coward.

I earn a lot of money, enough to ignore ideology I don't agree with, and messages that would have been considered totally inappropriate at one time.

Me in Backend dev contract. Everything worked great because I translated simple themes and worked with modules.

Did some work as full stack to same agency as a favor. Mostly frontend work but ok.

Now being judged as a frontend despite my multiple protests of not being a frontend developer. Nor do I have any interest in improving my skills as one.

It's now affecting my mental health and physical health. Thinking about not renewing that contract.

Every time a new hype thing appeared, I was annoyed, like "kids these days and their tiktoks".

But at some point in time, this pattern of mine changed completely. I don't know how it happened, I don't know when it happened, but now I experience... acute nostalgia?

I miss Elon Musk and his twitter fanbase. I miss tiktok. I feel like a time traveller who went into their past, which is our present, to experience the cultural landmarks once again, because their time here is limited, and tomorrow they will have to go back.

I miss my autism problems and mental health uphill battle. I miss avengers and thanos. I miss metaverse.

Oh, and also... I miss you.

!dev

Interested to know if anyone has taken psychedelics for depression or other mental health issues and what happened.
Just been looking into it a bit lately, a lot of the advocates for it say it’s changed lives. Having had depression from quite a young age and nothing really making a difference, I’m just wondering how much it actually helps.

So I started out in 2010ish as an intern, entirely remote. It let me attend school in my home state while working for a company elsewhere. Fast forward to 2017, I leave that company to work at a college, as a hybrid model. Found I was more productive on days that I was home/working from the lab versus days I was in the office. Skip to 2018, I get a job working for the Air Force which is ALSO hybrid. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good for me as when I was remote. In 2019 I started working for NYS and had to report to an office full time. YIKES was that not for me. My mental health started slipping, my physical health went out the window, and I barely got anything done. Along comes COVID and I'm back to 100% remote! Well, NYS Gov Cathy GoKill is trying to push state employees back to the office, and I really don't want to deal with that unnecessary stress again. Ever. Does anyone have any tips for starting out or looking for employment in the private sector, when my priority would be staying remote?

Guys, i am having a tough time in work. So, i am sharing the story and questions here-

Initially, i was doing well with new projects and other existing projects where implemented new features.

But recently, i am assigned to a old project created by clients and some senior developer worked on it .

Ps: I was also assigned to this project 8 months earlier but was reassigned to other projects.

Now, Our senior developer who worked on it resigned because of the messy project and a lot of pressure from boss.
my colleague also resigned because of this.

Due to this, all this pressure thrown upon me. I am working on it relentlessly but i am soo burned out that i am actually feeling sick and constantly having headache.

And main thing is that the project has so many errors which iam getting during testing and i have to fix all of the error.
And yes they have documentation but shitty unreadable documentation . My manager also rebuking me why i dont remember things said to me 8 months earlier. (That time i just joined the company)

I don't know what will happen to me if i cant tackle this project.
And what should i do in such cases as my mental health is deteriorating day by day.

Using LSP for a while now, of course, being also a NeoVim user, particularly attached to Vim's coding approach, I can't help but notice Microsoft's Language Server Protocol to be A LOT like Emac's editor approach to writing code. Was Emacs right all along? More so, have we actually slowed down software advancement by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages, putting speed above ergonomics and marginalizing many would-be contributors that have more LISP-like thinking? I wonder a lot about the future of writing code and the importance of, at least pseudo, artificial intelligence in that future. As we all know how easy it is to write pseudo-ai code in LISP-like languages, have we also delayed artificial intelligence by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages? But more importantly, IS IT TOO LATE? I mean, should we, instead of try "forcefully evolving" JavaScript, instead devise nem ways of coding with it that makes it more Scheme-like? This is a rent, but also a heart breaking moment for me, a devotee of languages like Rust, I can't stop, but wonder if my preferred language's perceived advances aren't only an actual coming back of LISP. Finally: it's heartbreaking to me that I just can't have a small sized Emacs distribution with Vim-like capabilities. Being actually able to kind of talk to your editor like emacs users could be a BIG improvement on developer's declining mental health stats.

ps: I'm not a natively English speaking person, please forgive tipos and other pedantic writing mistakes.

On another example of regressing for advancemente, the interested reader should read about performance differences and justification for it between grep and perl's regex implementation.